Decadent Echoes, the Language of Censorship and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness

In 1928, Radclyffe Hall's novel of lesbian emancipation The Well of Loneliness was tried for obscenity at Bow Street Magistrates' Court under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. The legal proceedings against Hall's novel were prompted by a whistle blowing review in the Sunday Express by the paper's editor James Douglas, who decried The Well as the product of decadence and perversion. This article analyses the overall reception of Hall's novel and focusses on the pathologizing language used by Douglas in his editorial, which raised the specter of decadence (embodied by the figure of Oscar Wilde) to kick the machinery of the law into action. Douglas deployed a naïve form of symptomatic reading that allowed him to conflate the novel's heroine Stephen Gordon and its author Radclyffe Hall in a manner reminiscent of the reception of Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray thirty-eight years earlier. Yet 'decadent echoes' can also be traced within the pages of The Well of Loneliness itself. Reading the novel 'in decadent terms' shows the paradoxical nature of decadence as a literary reference point: it could be invoked by the censors to vilify and deter, while writers like Hall could turn it into a site of resistance against the forces of ostracism, making The Well of Loneliness a key text in the history of literature and the law.